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Friday, May 17, 2013

Shane Carruth’s fantastic Upstream
Color is a film that all but demands cogitation. After watching it, one
can’t help thinking about it, and the great thing is that it not only holds up to
scrutiny but rewards those willing to give it further consideration. Carruth constructed
the movie with the precision of a Swiss watch (as he did with his first feature
Primer) while at the same time using
a suggestive and oblique storytelling style that does not provide fast answers.
This combination makes for a very pleasurable viewing experience. Concepts and
themes, meaning and import are all initially elusive, but we sense the order
behind everything and are confident that the more we think about the film, the
more little bits of it will suddenly make sense, like a blurry picture racking
into focus. The insights we get from these moments of clarity feel strikingly
personal, like we’ve made our own private discoveries, which endear us to the
movie even more.Much has been written about Upstream
Color since its screening at Sundance this year. Plot summaries, guides, and
analyses have all been part of an audience reaction that feels participatory
and of a piece with Carruth’s DIY approach to both the making and marketing of
his movie. (A couple good write-ups are here and here.) With a film that fosters
so much legitimately interesting conversation, it’s only natural to want to put
in one’s two cents, so this is my attempt to add to the discussion.At a certain point after my first viewing of UC, I somehow got it in my mind that it had a lot of similarities
to the film Blue, directed by
Krzystof Kieslowski. Following that train of thought, I came up with what
seemed like interesting connections, enough to try to write about. It’s really
just an excuse to talk out some of my thoughts about UC, while also directing more attention to what I think is my
favorite Kieslowski feature film. (I prefer it over the excellent Double Life of Véronique and also Red, which a lot of people choose as the
best Kieslowski, but if we’re including the entire Decalogue as one work then I think it’s pretty clear that that tops
everything.)Also, it’ll probably be necessary for you to have seen both movies
because I’m not really going to describe what happens in each one and will
probably refer to scenes or plot points in a shorthandish sort of way. So, here
we go, starting with:1) The ProtagonistWhile it may have made more sense to start with point 2, the thing
that really began to connect the two films for me was Amy Seimetz. This was the
first time I’d seen her and I thought her performance greatly contributed to UC’s power and resonance. Her role
required someone who could demonstrate vulnerability but also a determination
and resolve that should feel almost primal, something that feels innate instead
of acted. It’s hard to think of many other American actresses in Seimetz’s age
group that can pull off something like that, and so it was easier to think of a
younger Juliette Binoche. They seem to share many traits. Both are preternatural
beauties with high cheekbones, stylishly cropped hair, and soulful chestnut
eyes (while completely lacking the cold supermodelish quality of a lot of other
actresses). Besides zygomatics, they share the quality of being utterly
watchable, even—or rather, especially—when they aren’t doing anything onscreen.
That they both project intelligence is indisputable, but this intelligence
seems augmented by something akin to an immemorial wisdom. (They are both what
you’d call “old souls.”) There are a lot of actors who are compelling when they
feel or emote; Binoche and Seimetz are compelling when they are just sitting
there thinking. It’s as if in their quiescence
they are revealing something intrinsic about being human that we’ve forgotten,
some prelapsarian knowledge that would benefit us greatly were we to possess it.
You feel like you might actually learn something about yourself, watching them
in their silence.From that connection it was easy to think of Blue. It’s interesting to think of the arc of Binoche’s character (“Julie”)
in Blue and how it parallels the
story of Seimetz’s character (“Kris”) in UC.
Both suffer a traumatic event early and spend the rest of the movie trying to
recover from it. In Blue, Julie loses
her husband and daughter in a car crash; in UC,
Kris suffers the complete decimation of self and is left little more than a
husk of a person without a job or money. They both struggle to find some way to
reinvent themselves as they attempt to move on with their lives, but for the
bulk of both movies they are thwarted in their endeavors.Kris can’t get over a nagging feeling of connection to a pig harboring
a parasitic worm extracted from her body. In Blue, it seems that everything around Julie is conspiring to remind
her of the accident she so desperately wants to forget and put behind her. (Her
husband was a widely regarded composer who was in the middle of working on an
important symphonic piece for “the unification of Europe.” Lots of people understandably
want to see this piece completed. (It is revealed later that Julie is the one
who actually wrote her husband’s compositions, and so she is subject to an inner
turmoil that wouldn’t have existed had she not been the true author.))Both movies introduce a love interest who has some connection to
the protagonist’s traumatic event: It’s pretty clear early on that Carruth’s
character went through the same thing as Kris, and Julie is pursued by the
former assistant of her late husband. (It’s interesting that neither Kris nor Julie
have close friends to help them through their ordeals, as would typically be
the case. Neither movie addresses this curious absence of friends, though there
are enough suggestions that point to possible explanations (they both seem to
have been pretty wedded to their work, for example).)There are also small intriguing echoes in what happens to both characters.
They both purposely injure their right hand at some point—Julie by running it
against a stone wall, Kris by putting it through a glass window. Both hear
sounds and music that no one else around them hears. Both “give birth” to
surrogate/metaphoric children in animal form, which are subsequently killed (Kris:
pigs, Julie: mice). (There’s probably a more literal connection between
protagonist and newborns in Upstream
Color, whereas in Blue (and other
movies), Kieslowski made ample use of metaphor.)Both characters are also drawn to pools. It is there where they
seem most affected by previous events (Kris retrieves bits of stone from the
bottom of the pool and recites Walden;
Julie hears the music most strongly while swimming). It’s as if the water
facilitates the connection between character and previous events, and the pool
itself seems like an incubator for each movie’s themes, waiting for the
protagonist to return to it for further exploration.2) The Color BlueThis one is a no-brainer. The color blue features prominently in Upstream Color, and every occurrence seems
tied to the mysterious substance that allows for the mind-connection or
symbiosis that occurs in the movie. The dead pig babies emit plumes of blue
material, which turns the nearby flowers blue, then blue powder precipitate
forms on these plants, and this somehow gets into the worms, giving them blue
vein-like streaks. The characters are unconsciously drawn to the color blue,
with Carruth’s character picking out everything blue in a snack tray at a bar,
and Kris’s new workplace has streaks of blue in it.Kieslowski’s Blue is
also filled with a ton of blue (obviously). There are blue clothes, blue
folders, blue lollipops, and blue pen markings. Julie experiences visible bursts
of blue without warning (out of the blue, even). In Kieslowski’s film, blue
seems to symbolize the past, something that she can’t escape (and maybe doesn’t
even want to: after moving out of the house that holds too many painful
associations for her to stay, she decorates her new apartment with a blue
chandelier that was originally in her daughter’s room). In Upstream Color, blue seems to be an important part of an ongoing
chain, alluding to the movie’s themes of fate and choice. (Kieslowski said that
Blue was about the concept of
liberty, and the film clearly explores the notions of freedom and imprisonment albeit
in an emotional sense rather than a physical one.)Some have astutely noted that in Upstream Color there is an eventual shift to the color yellow,
possibly as a way of symbolizing the characters escape from the “blue” chain of
fate (which adds a healthy dose of irony to the fact that they end up painting the
bars of the pigs’ enclosure yellow). There is a color shift in Blue as well, but its counterpuntal
color is green, which shows up in places like Julie’s new apartment. It
definitely represents something in direct opposition to what blue represents,
though blue predictably remains the film’s dominant color. (Julie eventually
completes the “unification” composition and addresses all the loose ends of the
life she had wanted to abandon.)3) The FilmmakingBoth Carruth and Kieslowski employ similar techniques to tell
their stories. Both films start in a clipped way, with a series of contextless,
“uninflected” images (as Mamet would call them) and it is up to the viewer to
make sense of them. The movies also end in similar fashion, with an extended dialogueless
montage set to soaring music.And then there’s the ubiquitous shallow depth of field. Carruth
takes it to an extreme, as I believe every single shot in Upstream Color is done with a long lens. There are parts in Blue that appear to use a wider lens,
but there are plenty of shots that have just a sliver of focus.

Both movies are designed to be somewhat ambiguous and they both
encourage individual interpretation. They are also more rewarding with
subsequent viewings. Next time you want to give one or the other a re-watch,
think about making it a double-feature with both of these excellent, subtly
affined movies in tandem.DHS

Friday, May 10, 2013

My bookshelves actually don’t look all that different than they do when
I posted pictures of them last year. But I have made some notable additions to
it, which I thought I’d share with everyone. Despite the rise of ebooks and my
own personal buying habits (which usually involve buying new books in
electronic format), I do still have some affection for good old tangible books.
And they are undeniably more photogenic, that’s for sure.

This is the aftermath of my month of reading nothing but Carol DeChellis Hill. I basically snagged every halfway-interesting copy of her books
on the internet. From left to right, back to front, we have 3 copies of Let’s Fall in Love (hardcover (signed),
UK hardcover, paperback), 3 copies of Jeremiah
8:20 (2 signed), Subsistence USA (hardcover),
2 copies of Henry James’ Midnight Song
(An ARC and paperback), signed epistolary correspondence, 4 copies of The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer
(ARC, 2 copies of uncorrected proof (blue & green), paperback), 2 copies of
An Unmarried Woman (Uncorrected proof
and paperback), magazines containing CDH short stories (Playboy, two issues of Viva),
and two promotional photos included with advance copies of her work. Biggest
private collection of CDH memorabilia? Probably not, but it’s still…ample.

This is a first edition of Gain
inscribed by Richard Powers. The thing about Powers is that it’s been a policy
of his since the beginning that he never signs an actual book. The best he will
do during rare public appearances is sign a postcard or a bookplate or something
like that. A lot of people then affix what he signed to the first page of one
of his books. It’s not the best arrangement, but these sorts of improvised signed
editions still sell for hundreds of dollars. I got this copy on eBay for a
ridiculously small sum when nobody else was paying attention. Even came with a
bonus Saul Bellow quotation.

I found one volume of The
Last Tycoon manuscript, which complements my Great Gatsby manuscript facsimile. It’s actually part of a
three-volume set. The one I have, part 2, is half handwritten manuscript, half
corrected typescript. Pretty endlessly fascinating stuff.

I’ve always wanted one of those Ulysses manuscript facsimiles, and finally found one on eBay for
less than $100 (they usually go for two or three hundred). It’s cool, but Joyce’s
scrawl is borderline illegible. Luckily the third volume prints the entire novel
and notes all the differences from the manuscript. It’ll be useful in the
future when I drop everything and spend 6 months reading nothing but Joyce.
That’s the plan, anyway.

Not really part of my bookshelf but I put this frame up next to it.
It’s a few of the clippings I collected about David Foster Wallace. There’s
stuff from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly. The guy tends to haunt my reading habits, so
it seemed like an appropriate tribute. That black and white photo is my
favorite picture of him, by the way. It was taken when he was in the middle of
writing Infinite Jest and you can see
the mountainous IJ manuscript in the
foreground as well as all his books behind him (Nabokov, 2-volume OED). It’s
always interesting when you can take a peek at an author’s library. I assume he’s
working on IJ as the picture is being
taken, and I love the small smile of quiet amusement on his face; I like to
think that he had just written something that even he found clever or interesting
or funny, maybe a moment during the Eschaton sequence (“Pemulis tells Lord he
cannot believe his fucking eyes. He
tells Lord how dare he don the dreaded red beanie over such an obvious instance
of map-not-territory equivocationary horseshit as Ingersoll’s trying to foist”).
RIP DFW.

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

NB: This will be an exercise in spontaneity. I’m
just going to jot all this out and not revise endlessly and hope it comes out
semi-coherent. I know I should probably do more blog entries, but I have a
propensity to work on massive pieces instead of a bunch of little ones. This
will be a littler one, I think. It’s also about movies, which I swore I was
going to go cold turkey on writing about, since I feel I write about them too
much. But hopefully it will be about enough other things to be interesting to
people who don’t care all that much about movies.A couple things piqued my
interest recently. One was the review of Iron Man 3 I read in the NYTimes on Friday. The reviewer, Manohla Dargis, doesn’t
really review the movie so much as ruminate on its place in the world we
inhabit. Or, more accurately, she judges its appropriateness. For her, the
action scenes of the movie too readily recall the recent tragedy in Boston, and
the villains perpetrating acts of domestic terrorism are too similar to
real-life counterparts for the movie to work as the piece of pop escapism it so
clearly wants to be. (In all fairness to Ms. Dargis, the movie didn’t seem to
interest her much on a very basic level, so she had to find something to write about.) One gets the sense that Ms. Dargis has
been offended on multiple levels; she starts out by complaining about the
excessive explosions and gunfire, then criticizes what she interprets as the
movie’s cavalier approach to the events of 9/11 (she mentions the infamous date no
fewer than six times in the review). This blasé attitude toward such a traumatic
event is borderline unconscionable to her. While Ms. Dargis doesn’t completely
abjure the use of “9/11 evocations” (or whatever) in movies, she just doesn’t
want the events used all willy-nilly, without thought or consideration. The
review seems to be a rallying cry of sorts: If a movie refers to 9/11, Ms.
Dargis propounds, the events that took place should be explored, addressed
directly and truthfully and significantly, and not just “exploited.” (There’s
actually a certain pathos to her plea, because what she’s really saying is “Why
can’t they just make good art?”)Ms. Dargis also mentions something that I finally decided to look
up: A couple weeks ago Steven Soderbergh gave a speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival that has been generating a fair amount of buzz.
It’s basically a “State of the Union” address about the film industry. He
starts out by relating an anecdote about this guy he saw during a flight who
watched nothing but the action scenes of a bunch of movies, skipping ahead to
the “good” parts: the car chases, the climactic gunfight, etc. Mr. Soderbergh
is understandably disturbed at what he is witnessing, which is basically the
desecration of an art form he has dedicated most of his life to. He then
half-rues, half-accepts the current reality of Hollywood funding, which is that
they feel more comfortable bankrolling a $200 million movie with costumed
superheroes than they are funding a “mid-level” $35 million feature about real
human beings (viz. exactly the kind of movie Mr. Soderbergh makes). You can see
why Ms. Dargis brought this speech up, since her own points dovetail nicely
with Mr. Soderbergh’s (“Why can’t they just make good art?”).I’m not without sympathy for the arguments of Mr. Soderbergh (it
really does seem that movies like Being
John Malkovich, for instance, would never get funded today) and Ms. Dargis (the
terrorist videos in IM3 had a chilling
and arguably unnecessary verisimilitude that was perhaps a little out of place),
and I do think something’s been up
since 9/11. But I think they might both be missing the mark a little. Putting
aside the fact that terrorists and explosions and toppling structures and
falling bodies have been around in summer popcorn movies for a while now, way
before 9/11 (e.g. go ahead and Youtube the opening scenes of Armageddon), I don’t think the problem
lies in disturbing imagery or violent content in movies. The problem lies with
narrative and our relation to it.During and immediately after the events of 9/11, there was a
general consensus on what the day looked/felt like. You heard it over and over:
“It was like a movie.” That always struck me as odd. After all, nothing I saw
on TV that day looked like something from the movies I really love and respond
to, movies like My Dinner with Andre
or Annie Hall or Before Sunrise. I know that’s not what people were talking about,
but without adding a qualifier (“action movie,” “summer movie”) it did make crystal clear the benighted
level at which most people considered something to be “a movie.” (Experiment: After your next magical date, turn to the other person and
say the night was “just like a movie.” If the blank stare lasts longer than 5 seconds,
escape while you can.)But so if after 9/11 we were stuck in a movie brought to life, it
seems important to ask what kind of movie. Well, the only type of movie where
that level of destruction and devastation occurs is the mega-blockbuster. We
weren’t in a quiet little chamber piece. This was a prototypical big-budget disaster
movie. And all mega-blockbusters have common elements: a dramatic opening
scene, clearly delineated heroes and villains, obstacles ultimately overcome
through perseverance and innate ability, and a final and all-encompassing
triumph over evil. And we quickly accepted that this was the story we were in,
largely because it offered solace when nothing else made much sense. If we were
in a narrative where the World Trade Center towers came down, so be it, but we
would see that the rest of the story unfolded as these kinds of stories always
do: with struggle, retribution, and eventual victory.There have not been a lot of good pieces of art that have directly
“taken on” the events of 9/11. I can think of only two. One, the movie United 93, is a pretty straight-forward
reenactment of what actually happened; the filmmakers realized that the truth
held more than enough power without adding anything to it. The second is Don
DeLillo’s novel Falling Man. It’s
about a man and a woman who escape the towers on that fateful day and cross
paths in the subsequent weeks. One of the major points of the novel, delivered
with consummate subtlety and skill, is something I think we all realize but
find it hard to articulate: 9/11 imposed narrative on us, where before there
was none. There was not just the overarching narrative involving our fight
against the enemies of Freedom, but it also affected our quotidian narratives in
the small ways it impinged on our daily low-key existence. From that point on our
lives were inextricably wrapped up in a story not of our choosing. We were in
that movie where bad guys were out there, blowing stuff up, killing our fellow citizens.
A world where there were clearly defined good guys (us) and clearly defined bad
guys (them). This was our collective narrative, whether we liked it or not.
Some of us embraced it, but a fair number of us were deeply unsettled. And I
don’t think we were disturbed solely by our internal debate about the morality of war, or the
abuse of national power, or things like that. We were, on a deeper level,
really unsettled at living in a narrative that traditionally had ironclad
concepts of right and wrong, good and bad—a world where everything is black
and white, just like a summer movie. We were unsettled because we know the world
is never black and white, that things are never that simple. There are shades
of gray, ambiguities, confusion, uncertainties, doubt—all the things anathema
to a big-budget popcorn movie.Now, we know we are not in a movie, even if the post-9/11 world seems
like one (and some, scarily, have been convinced it is). Most of us know that
the last thing the world resembles is a straight narrative. That’s where Ms.
Dargis’s view starts to fall apart. It shouldn’t matter how many explosions are
in a movie or how many times 9/11 is supposedly evoked, we know it’s not
reality. And we know this not because there’s a guy with an iron suit flying
around, but rather because credits pop up, a story is told, and more credits
roll. This is not particularly faithful to how life is, particularly the
ultimate beginning and ultimate end parts. (Sure, we as individuals experience
beginnings and endings, but life goes on before and after, plus we don’t have
the luxury of analyzing how it went after we reach our ending, sitting in a
coffee shop with friends, teasing out themes, arguing about the plot.) Narrative
is faker than any fantastic alien a CGI artist can come up with. We impose it
on our selves, or other events do, if they’re big enough. But it is not how the
world works. In a way, that guy on the plane was watching something much closer
to reality than narrative features depict (for what is the 21st Century so far
but a series of contextless explosions?).I’m not saying narrative is worthless. Nor am I advocating a
proliferation of non-narrative films. (Besides, even the most “non-narrative”
film has a beginning and ending and something inbetween, which ultimately
constitutes narrative, no matter how scrambled up it may seem when the lights
go down. (As Jean-Luc Godard is purported to say, “A story should have a
beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”)) And I’m
certainly not saying we should be the guy that just watches explosions. There are
ways for art to engage meaningfully with these big concerns that both Ms.
Dargis and Mr. Soderbergh seem to want movies to address, and something with a
strong narrative will most likely turn out to be the artwork that does it. But
we should probably stop expecting our art to be mimetic of the real world, or
regarding a kind of simulacrumness as some gold standard for art. To paraphrase
David Mamet, the goal of art shouldn’t be to recreate the conversation two
people had on a bus this morning, the goal should be to have them say something
better. Narrative is our chance to write, draw, film something better. Narrative
can be edifying, illuminating, vital, important.
But it shouldn’t be mistaken for life, and vice versa. Our lives are our own,
and art resides outside, whether it’s an important cinematic masterpiece or
just a dumb summer superhero flick. In the end, it’s all escapism.

About Me

So I'm officially an author. My book is called Deadly Reflections, and is available on the Kindle Store right this second. I encourage anyone who likes a good love story with paranormal aspects to check it out!